I found this a really interesting critique of the processes of Big Tech, where a service starts good and cheap, and becomes large and entrenched, and then becomes noticeably poor value for customers. Enshittification, it is also called.
Respect that is limited to holy people, just points out how little respect we have for everyone else.
As long as teachers allow students to simply swap gross attachments for more refined versions of the same, suffering for both teachers & students, will be inevitable.
I was encouraged, humbled, and enjoyed watching this video yesterday:
Edit: oops, this was supposed to go in the Israel-Palestine thread. But I guess it fits in nicely here too.
When Israel was re-established in 1948, the land the Palestinians were inhabiting stretched into Jordan and Egypt and the border into Lebanon was also further into Lebanon. These countries refused the Palestinians that land. Other countries like Syria and Iraq deemed this "avoiding the Palestinian refugee problem" Why are these countries not being held accountable as well?
Some Arab countries in the region did provide some support to Palestinian refugees, including humanitarian aid and setting up refugee camps. However, the decision to not fully integrate Palestinian refugees into their societies was influenced by political considerations, concerns about national identity, and to maintain pressure on Israel to address the refugee issue which they created.
However the responsibility for finding a solution lies with all parties involved, including neighboring Arab countries, Israel, the Palestinians, and the international community. And the spanner in the works is it would seem the US veto power...
What Meditation Is About
Nutshell answer.. it's about Minding your own business
Easy for you to mock the efforts of others. I don’t see you making any efforts of your own devising.
It seems to me that all search for truth can’t get away from the subjectivity of it, the fact that your own viewpoint defines the results and extents of the search. This leads you to explore yourself, to deconditioning and self-observation. In many ways earnestness, a commitment to honesty inside and outside yourself, is an ally in this search, an accelerant of the process in which you let go of many things.
It really is a process where the question “who am I?” forces you to confront all the untruths. It leads to many questions about yourself, and a long process of letting go of things. But as Ramana Maharshi said, “the question ‘who am I’ is not meant to get an answer, it is meant to dissolve the questioner”, and eventually the questions stop coming.
Eventually this exploration of the self leads you to a set of core issues. For me these were, how I related to honour, keeping my word, honesty; and later to love, my mother and my birth. Beyond that even to my earlier sense of being.
@IdleChater said:
That's fine, knock yourself out! But let's call it what it is: "Not Buddhism".
In a certain way, all of our lives, even that which seems not to be Buddhism, actually becomes involved with Buddhist practice. Maybe that is too Zen a standpoint for the normal Buddhist but to me it seems true. Gardening becomes a meditation, the food we eat becomes spiritual in obtaining and preparing, even reading becomes soaked in evaluating and taking in concepts using a spiritual thought process.
OP, I'm going to express a radical position on karma here, and point out, that in his earliest discourses, the Buddha cautioned against projecting karma to future lifetimes (and one would assume correspondingly--from past lifetimes to the present), and simply focus on the current lifetime. He seemed to be saying, that past and future karmas "aren't relevant" to his path, in the same way he told his followers, that whether or not there is a supreme deity or deities was not a relevant matter.
Some scholars feel that the multi-lifetime karma concept seeped into the texts from an outside influence, namely--Hinduism. Karma isn't a trap, or something to bludgeon people with if they were born into adverse circumstances. It's simply the law of cause and effect applied to the current lifetime; be careful how you treat others, so you won't have to worry about your misdeeds or harsh speech bouncing back to you, basically is the idea.
And by the way, there is a therapy technique for trauma that doesn't involve talking about the incident/s. It's a miracle treatment that heals the mind by working with eye movements, helping the brain to reprocess past painful experiences. It's called EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. After treatment, you'll still have the memories, but they'll no longer be painful or debilitating. You'll be emotionally neutral and calm in relation to them.
Another option that doesn't involve talking is a certain type of acupuncture that works with psychological states. It can be a little challenging to find a good practitioner though; the acupuncture field in the US (I don't know where you're located) is dominated by a system from China, which they call "Traditional Chinese Acupuncture" (TCM), when in fact, Mao purged the traditional techniques that really work. You'd need to find someone who practiced 5 Element acupuncture, sometimes called "classical" acupuncture, from Taiwan or Hong Kong, and tell the practitioner that you need a special set of modalities called "Ghost Point" acupuncture for a childhood history of trauma. No talk, just treatment, which in your case would require a long course. You could Google "Ghost Point Acupuncture" + your locale. Also "7 Dragons" acupuncture.
I've received these types of treatments, both EMDR and Ghost Point acupuncture, on various occasions, and can vouch for their effectiveness. If you have questions you'd like to ask privately, you may message me.
Relief can be achieved, OP. Healing CAN happen! There is hope. Hugs, and best wishes.